Kingtone

please come back zippy, we miss you.

Bandcamp is a great new service for musicians/bands to sell/promote/give away music online. Music fans can download/purchase a wide variety of formats of individual tunes or entire cds. ALL the money goes to the artist (via Paypal). It also optimizes any search for an artist/song so it shows up first.

While there will be some advertising associated with it, the artist will get a cut of that income - very cool and very unlike places like MySpace…I’ll be placing all my official releases up there which will leave more room here for unreleased and oddball stuff of interest. Please check it out

here is an example of a shared player for one of my tunes:

This is a republish of an older post. A CD of this project, 73-D is being released on the Swiss Musicians Association label on Sept 13, 2008.

In the Fall of 2006, I traveled to Europe to perform a variety of shows including solo experimental, a duo collaboration with Laurie Amat, and a very interesting week of performances in Bern, Switzerland with my friend Philipp Zuercher and his Fractaloid Project. In Philipp’s words:

Fractaloid 1-9 are 72 hours of live music, composed by Philipp Zuercher. The main issue is the interaction between four musicians and huge virtual structures: a computer program makes a looping device produce “a heap of empty wraps that want to be filled with musical contents”.

The form of those wraps is based on the aesthetics of fractals. Fractals are fragmented geometric shapes that are self-similar and appear in nature, too. The composition was first performed by four musicians, playing nine shifts of 8 hours each at Marks Blond, Bern-Switzerland (September 14th to 17th 2006).

The looping/sequence program Phillipp created called for the performer to record at specific moments, graphically represented on a computer screen from hot to cold colors. Red parts were, ‘must record!’ and blue were, ‘listen only’ with gradations in between. These gradations chopped up the recorded bits and threw them back, sometimes for many minutes at a time, allowing the performer to listen to the progression of things or take a break and get some food and drink! Each composition of sequences lasted around 40 minutes and would then start over, going around and around continuously for 8 hours straight, relentlessly, until the next musician took over.

I have fond memories of performing my three 8 hour shifts in the little MarksBlond.com hut, which has room for approximately 12 people and is situated in a nice upper middle class neighborhood next to an old stone church. I especially remember my last shift, which was from 4am to 12pm on Sunday. Food, energy and inspiration were running low when the church’s bells started pealing - echoing around the previously tranquil neighborhood, calling worshipers with that ancient, deep, cast-metal BONG, BONG, BONG that one only really experiences in Europe. I’d been performing all by myself for many, many hours and was getting mighty punchy, so I decided to incorporate the bells into the recording. I hastily stuck a mic out the door and managed to create some very satisfying musical chaos. At some point after this, I stumbled down the street in a crazed, sleep deprived, low blood sugar state in order to record the bells with my portable recorder, and received some concerned looks from a few of the staid, well dressed residents making their way to the morning service.

ICS is an organization of musician/kooks that form mysterious lodges in order to use a very powerful and prolific composition technique known as the twenty song game.

This week’s Oakland East Bay Express features an in depth cover story about The Immersion Composition Society. Check it out, get inspired and start your own lodge!

As a charter member of New Lodge, formed in 2002 (and sort of morphing into IconoLodge in 2005), it has proven quite prolific. Check the MP3 vault for some examples.

I’ll be part of a gigantic minimalist piece for 200 guitars, A Crimson Grail by Rhys Chatham at Lincoln Center in New York City on Friday August 15. The piece was originally scored for and performed by 400 guitars, but this outdoor take should still be fairly impressive.

The piece is very expansive and meditative, waves of sympathetic tuned guitars taking on a choir like voice. Really quite beautiful - less jarring and noisy than Glenn Branca’s fantastic SYMPHONY NO. 13 (Hallucination City) for 100 guitars I played in at the LA Philharmonic in 2006.

Other gigs:

Aug 22
Hexagon in Baltimore, MD
with The Expanding Man group, led by Carlos Guillen and will include David Grollman and LM this go round.

There is a possibility that MPG (Menegon, Price, Grollman) may make an appearance somewhere on the east coast this August…stay tuned.

There’s something about San Jose that is very beige. Jon Brumit’s South Bay Talent Center - part of San Jose’s Who’s on 1st public art program I had the pleasure of performing in - is not one of them, however.

It was my intention to present a solo ten minute version of the American Pied piece that I debuted at the Boise Experimental Festival (as a 30 minute conducted group improvisation). It met with limited success, but a super-cool spinet wurlitzer organ onstage saved the day, was incorporated into an old ICS song, The Day I Learned to Sell and, despite my rustiness on the keys, went over quite well.

Other talent demonstrations included a gal who spun yarn from her cat’s hair, a very interesting homeless guy named Red who played a penny whistle and told stories and a gal who held a headstand for 3 minutes - with whom I later collaborated on a sound piece as she played a contact mic with her head in a headstand. You know, Art.

However, the real fun started after the gig. We were joined by a few more friends and found ourselves at the Global Village Vietnamese vegetarian restaurant. Things quickly took on David Lynch overtones with curious menu items such as sizzings disk, grilled.com.veg.beef (which I ordered), several that were listed as being out of order and a very hands-on waiter/owner/husband and cook/wife team. The food was delicious, the company grand and the table conversation lively. We blew passed the time to go catch Batman - The Dark Knight at a real drive-in, paid our incredible $45 bill for eight people and hit Beige-town instead.

Highlights included visits to the Cesar Chavez public fountain sign pictured above, a lovely physics/sound exhibit that would have made Rube Goldberg happy, some not so great ‘Who’s on 1st’ public art exhibits and ended back at the Talent Center for an after hours jam. Things got pretty nutty and included some subtle work by the maestro himself (see vid). Fortunately, the San Jose Saturday night revelers walking by on the main drag paid us no mind. Ah yes. So very beige.

Albany CA is a sleepy little city that is part of the East Bay just north of Berkeley. A mostly ‘middle class’ (for the SF Bay Area) kinda place where people raise kids without the fears of many modern urban dwellers. It has a conservative 1950s feel to it, and from what I hear the cops there like it that way. Strangely enough, it is home to some amazing talent and subversiveness. Maybe that is not strange at all.

Here’s some examples I have experienced.

This past weekend I played on a session with Drag City artist, Edith Frost. It was a nice song titled, My Euphorbia and was recorded for a possible future DC comp that apparently has something to do with the tracks being performed live. Those in attendance were Edith, Wil Hendricks on standup bass, myself on guitar, Val Esway and Heather Davison on backup vocals. Edith and Wil (via Chicago) live in Albany.

Last monday night, we kicked off a new monthly ‘Improv Hootenany’ series at the Ivy Room in, you guessed it, Albany, CA. The idea is to have a place for outsound artists to hang out and try new and crazy music collaborations in an upscale, comfy, dimly-lit place where fans can come, sip a cocktail and appreciate the music with no cover. There was a featured set from Myles Boisen and John Hanes, sets curated by Jonathan Segel, Joe Rut, John Shiurba, Carnacki and yours truly - aided and abetted by the likes of Suki O’Kane, John Brumit, Karry Walker, Pat Spurgeon (of Rogue Wave), Morgan Guberman and some great walk ons. The whole evening was glued together with special DJ sets by LA based Scrote and Carnacki.

Several now legendary punk bands hail from Albany, CA - like Operation Ivy and offshoots like Schlong and Rancid. Schlong and OPIvy’s maniac drummer was Dave Mello, whom I played with in the HO! along with Albany’s Tim Romain and Joey Schaaf - who also played in The Dance Hall Crashers and in Zebu with myself and Dave Mello’s brother, Pat Mello (also of Schlong). Tight webs, these band lineages often are.

Albany, CA is also the home of Gerald Gaxiola aka The Maestro: King of the Cowboy Artists, which is, coincidentally, also a movie by El Cerrito’s Les Blank about The Maestro and making art for art’s sake. Every time I see it I want to be and remain, an artist.

note: El Cerrito is just north of and pretty much the same kind of place as Albany. And yes, Creedence Clearwater Revival started in El Cerrito.

We haven’t talked amps in a while. Been meaning to though as I’ve made some major changes. The first biggie was I sold my beloved 1971 Hiwatt 100 head. It was just too much juice for my tender ears. It lives with a good friend now, so I sleep well knowing that. The second is the recent addition of Harley, a 1952 Gibson GA-20 that I acquired from a nice lady named Dusty. Her dad, Harley, bought it new in nineteen and fifty-two (or three). It needed a fair amount of work done to get it into playing shape, but now it screams with a nasty early B.B. King blues tone. I have also discovered it to be a perfect combination for controlled feedback with my Gretsch and have used it for several performances to date for that express purpose.

My 1965 Princeton Reverb continues to be my main amp and it is great to be able to mix and match it with Harley and my 1959 Alamo Titan (that my comrade Rob Price used to much satisfaction on the recent ‘Steady As She Goes’ west coast tour). This is a shot of the Alamo backstage at the Boise Experimental Festival, on top of some great vintage pails and next to an amazing vintage marching drum I procured for my set.

Just returned from a week of shows with my pals Rob Price and David Grollman. It was a great run culminating with a show at the 3rd annual Boise Experimental Music Festival. I’ll be posting some more mp3s soon and lots of pics. Steady as she goes…

I’ve attended and performed at every BEMF and this one had some really great talent. Here is a quick synopsis…

It was an honor and humbling experience to twice hear acoustic guitarist Jim McAuley. His ability to perform outside music with varied instrumentation, utilizing interesting tunings and a fearless sense of composition were a revelation. Jeff Kaiser and I marveled at Jim’s ability to bring together traditional structures with avant garde techniques and composition. Jim plays melodies, he deconstructs harmonic form and he’s a badass soloist…but above all it was MUSIC. And I tell ya, sometimes these experimental festivals can test just about anyone’s definition.

Other highlights were The Transhumans rockin set, Rob Wallace, Colter Frazier, & Jim Connolly’s mindblowing saturday night trio improvisation, Tom Baker’s glass fretboard and fretless guitar tones, Kribophoric, The Choir Boys, and the duo of Emily Hay and Motoko Honda and their excursions of insanity.

The Mule Racers, Winnemucca, NV